The Plan

I've been thinking for a few days about which railroads I should document first.  Growing up in rural Minnesota and being mildly fascinated by trains I quickly came to realize most towns in Minnesota came about because of the railroad.  Almost every village and town relied on the railroad to transport crops, lumber, iron, and other raw materials, and to bring the mail, lumber, dry goods, etc etc.  In the early days the railroad was the only mode if transportation to another town.

     I know of several abandoned lines.  One, near my current city of residence, Willmar, runs southwest from St. Cloud to Willmar, passing through Rockville, Cold Spring, Richmond, Roscoe, Hawick, New London, Spicer and ending at Willmar.  This will be the first line I document.

     I grew up around Hutchinson, which at one time had two railroads.  One, the Minnesota and Western, also known as the Luce Line, ran from Minneapolis all the way to Gluek, west of Clara City.  The line was abandoned in sections from the 1970s onwards and some of the former trackage is now part of the Luce Line State Trail.  Hutchinson also had a line connecting it to Glencoe to the southeast.  This line roughly follows the current route of Hwy 22, and parts of the old right of way can still be viewed from the road, though by and large the line has been swallowed up by both the property owners along the route as well as nature.

     The other one I want to document is the former line running through Edgerton MN, where my grandmother lives.  The only thing I have been able to find out so far is that the line went from Edgerton northeast to Chandler and then presumably onto Slayton.  Whether or not the line went further past Slayton or west of Edgerton for that matter remains to be determined, although it probably went onward at least till Pipestone, a "big" city.

     There will of course be others I will document but these are the ones I know for certain existed.     I'm really excited to uncover forgotten histories of these small towns.